1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing device, an image processing method and an image processing program that perform image processing on an image imaging a biological body.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, as a medical observation apparatus that can perform an observation in a patient lumen in a non-invasive manner, an endoscope is widely prevalent. Recently, a capsule endoscope becomes prevalent, which is inserted in a subject, proceeds in a lumen by peristaltic motion and captures an image.
Meanwhile, a diagnosis using such a medical observation apparatus is an operation of requiring many experiences and imposing a heavy burden on a user (such as a doctor). Especially, in an examination using a capsule endoscope, for example, since several tens of thousands of intraluminal images are acquired over about eight hours, it is a quite difficult operation to identify a lesion region or the like from a large amount of intraluminal images. Therefore, various medical diagnosis support functions supporting a diagnosis are desired, and, as one of image recognition techniques to realize the support functions, a technique of automatically detecting an abnormal region (i.e. region of interest) from intraluminal images and illustrating an image to be intensively diagnosed is proposed.
For example, Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2005-192880 discloses an image processing method of calculating feature data based on a color tone in an input image and determining an abnormal finding region in the image based on the feature data.